“Big companies need small storage too,” says Krone. We're the first to run McAfee virus scan technology natively, he says. “We were able to get together because our parents know each other.”

The real benefit for offering Intel's AV technology, particularly in larger environments where security is a major concern, is that you can put the px12-450r in a remote site and “sleep at night knowing its protected like everything else in their environment,” he says. “Also, we believe it is the first time anybody has taken a big anti-virus product and run it on a storage device.”

Initially, Krone expects the new arrays to do well in the performance segment of the sub-$10,000 NAS market, which accounts for approximately 20% of the market. It's a new segment for Iomega, and with the faster hardware, courtesy of Intel, he believes they will do well there. However, he says the McAfee AV should prove to be the most important element of the announcement, expanding the company's market, especially into the ROBO space.

Stuart Miniman, Wikibon senior analyst, tends to agree that the Ivy Bridge updates will draw the most interest. “Having just seen the server and connectivity vendors all go through the round of updates for this round of Intel updates, customers can expect to see a significant increase in bandwidth from this new generation of solutions and EMC Iomega is first to deliver this on the storage side. There's fast churn on the drives (spinning disk and flash) and the increase in bandwidth helps keep up with allowing for a balanced system architecture.”

As to the overall significance for Iomega and the potential overlap with EMC's entry-level enterprise storage products (VNXe), Miniman says EMC's strategy is to make sure that there are no air gaps in its portfolio that a competitor can wedge a solution in between. So while there may begin to be some overlap between VNXe and the newest member of the Iomega family, customers have options based on the feature, functionality and pricing that they require.

“EMC Iomega brings a robust set of features to a market that is more familiar with consumer technology. It's a good fit for the low-end of the server virtualization market.”

A complete redesign of the previous top-end px12-350r which debuted last August, the px12-450r comes with 8GB RAM, support for both 4TB hard disk drives and 10 gigabit Ethernet networks, and features the latest version the EMC LifeLine operating system. Expected to start shipping in early Q3, it will be available in a range of configurations, from a diskless HDD model up to a 48TB configuration when 4TB disk drives become available, with prices starting at $5,499.99.

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Stemming from the company's Project Voyager initiative--two years of R&D, a $300 million investment, and more than 900 patents—the next-generation servers are intended to "redefine the expectations and economics of the data center," including tripling administrator productivity and delivering a return on investment in as little as five months.

The latest offerings include servers based on AMD Opteron 6200 Series, Intel Xeon E5-2400 and E5-4600 processors, as well as optional HP PCIe Gen2 IO Accelerators to reduce data access latency and deliver accelerated application performance and improved compute cycles. The rack and tower servers, and a new blade server with the E5-2400 family, will enable HP to extend its market from the enterprise down to SMBs, says John Gromala, HP's director of product marketing, industry standard servers and software.

There's now one set of offerings from end to end, says Gromala: "It's a great opportunity for us to take these great capabilities and bring them to a broader set of customers with midmarket offerings."

In March HP said the Gen8 servers had been tested in more than 100 data centers by customers including Alcatel-Lucent, British Telecom, Nth Generation Computing and Purdue University. While Gromala wouldn't give specific shipment numbers, the company is reporting that it has delivered the new servers to thousands of new clients, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, JPMorgan Chase, and Raytheon.

While being formally unveiled this week, the HP ProActive Insight Architecture Alliance has been in the works for some time, says Gromala. Focused on maximizing the built-in intelligence of the new servers, members include providers in the memory, storage, I/O, power and infrastructure segments. Current members are Broadcom (Ethernet), Delta Electronics (switching power supplies), Emulex (I/O connectivity), Fusion-io (I/O accelerators), HGST (hard drives), Mellanox (InfiniBand solutions), Qlogic (adapters), Rittal (intelligent racks), Samsung (solid-state drives), SanDisk (SSDs), Seagate (drives), SK Hynix (memory), Toshiba Storage Products Business Unit (storage), as well as Flextronics, Lite-On Technology, Micron, Smart Modular Technologies and WD.

There are six models in this announcement. The DL360e is a rack-optimized one-rack unit (1U) server targeted at small, midsize and enterprise organizations, while the rack-optimized two-rack unit (2U) DL380e Gen8 provides improved compute and storage capacity for data center applications. The ML350e is an expandable two-processor tower for remote and branch office environments, while the BL420c blade server reportedly offers enhanced manageability for applications requiring high availability and performance for midmarket and cost-sensitive enterprise customers. The two AMD-based offerings are the DL385p, a 2U performance-based rack server designed for virtualization, database and high-performance computing workloads, and the BL465c, the first server blade with 2,000 cores per rack for virtualization, database and high-performance workloads.Gromala says these models will ship in volume within the next 30 days, with prices ranging from $1,600 to $3,500. Sometime later this summer HP will start shipping density-optimized form factors for both blade and rack servers based on the E5-4600 processor.

HP is also increasing customer support and financing options, including the HP Proactive Care offering with up to 66% faster problem resolution. The HP Financial Services Refresh for Less program can help organizations transition to the new servers without requiring capital budget.

Analysts were not pre-briefed on the latest announcements, but at the March roll-out Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, called the new servers a step up from previous HP solutions.

Overall, he sees Gen8 as more keeping HP in the race, rather than giving it a significant advantage over its major competitors. "As the market moves further and further toward cloud-centric data centers and provisioning, server vendors including HP will have to improve their offerings around system and facilities management issues or risk being left behind."

IDC's Jed Scaramella, research manager, enterprise servers, believes HP's new line has some good technical features that should help customers become more efficient with their IT infrastructures. "The challenge for HP is to execute on convincing customers to move upstream with HP."

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Formerly known as Hyper Memory Cubes, the new Hybrid Memory Cubes promise memory bandwidth up to 1 Tbps, more than 10 times what today's DDR-3 can deliver, while using about one-eighth the power per gigabyte. The cube is a hybrid package that stacks four or eight DRAM chips on top of a base-level memory controller chip.

Stacking the chips in a small package has several advantages. First, the stack keeps the interconnections between the memory chips and logic chip significantly shorter than they could be on a more conventional DIMM. At multigigahertz-frequencies, distances--even those measured in just a few inches--matter, since data signals are limited by the speed of light to traveling about one foot per nanosecond.

Using a stack rather than a single chip required the Hybrid Memory Cube designers to develop what they're calling silicon through-vias, which provide data paths vertically through the extra-thin silicon chips that make up each layer. Without silicon through-vias, signal paths would have to extend to the edges of each chip, where a massive number of interconnection wires would have to be connected. This would slow performance and make the whole thing too complex to manufacture cost effectively.

Most significantly, it allows designers to use completely different integrated circuit manufacturing processes for the memory controller logic chip and the DRAM chips themselves. Combining logic and memory on the same chip means the logic sections of the chip have to be produced using the memory chip process, which significantly limits their performance. A dedicated logic chip provides significantly more horsepower for ECC and other memory management.

We should see Hybrid Memory Cubes appear as preproduction samples some time in 2013, with the technology appearing as an extended processor cache in leading-edge servers, as vendors roll out their next generation of servers in 2014 to 2015. With power players like Micron, Intel, Samsung and most recently Microsoft in the consortium, odds are good that Hybrid Memory Cubes could be the solution to our memory bandwidth woes.

Disclaimer: Micron has provided SSDs for use in DeepStorage Labs.

It's a change in direction for the company, according to some experts.

"It wasn't much more than a year or so ago that Larry Ellison was publicly deriding the notion of cloud computing as basically smoke and mirrors," says Charles King, president and principal analyst at Pund-IT. "Mark Hurd claimed recently that Oracle did $1 billion in cloud services business in the last year. It's interesting to try to sort out what the reality is from the public-relations positioning that's going on."

The shift comes as more users turn to the cloud: According to a new survey from Cisco, while only 5% of 1,300 IT executives surveyed use cloud computing to deliver the majority of the software applications in their businesses, the adoption rate is expected to grow to 20% by year's end. For a more bullish outlook on cloud adoption, Forbes just reported that on average, 34% of companies' IT budgets are now allocated to cloud computing solutions.

The whole issue with cloud-based services is trying to separate what might have traditionally been called a standard hosted application service from what's essentially a cloud service that's closely aligned with traditional data center management strategies.

"That was one of the reasons Ellison derided cloud in the first place," says King. "I think what we're seeing is Oracle repositioning hosted services that they've offered for some time as somehow being cloud-based. That doesn't detract from their quality or the company's success."

In a blog post on the subject, Mark Peters, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), writes, "Oracle looks set ... to present a significant threat to the more entrenched 'whole-enchilada' systems vendors."

Oracle's Long-Term Cloud Strategy

Peters' colleague Brian Babineau, VP, research and analyst services at ESG, says Oracle's cloud computing plans bring together software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings with social collaboration tools, while accessing the database management technology for which the vendor is renown.

"They have a very good, long-term strategy, and they've made moves that way. With the acquisition of Taleo in the SaaS category, it brings that to the forefront," says Babineau. "They have essentially Oracle Database Express as a way to develop database-as-a-service almost in the market right now, and one would expect they've the ability to expand on that. They've also communicated they're going to try to transition some of their Oracle applications to be delivered as a service, as well."

Babineau says cloud computing is a consumption model that Oracle understands and respects as much as any vendor. It's through the cloud that Oracle will integrate its respective offerings.

"They have talent management, they have business intelligence, they have resource planning applications; the goal going forward is to leverage a consumption model that helps connect and puts those pieces together," he says. "Over time, the cloud consumption model will drive the need for these things to be integrated and connected, and Oracle gets it. They understand that through the cloud, because it's a new consumption model, more people will have access to this data, and they're not going to be selling isolated, stand-alone apps; these things are going to have to be put together."

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